Why spending less time with email is important Would you like to spend a lot less time in your email?
Well, then this video is for you, because I'm sharing with you my top five time-saving tips for getting the most out of Gmail.
Hello, everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress.
And if we can shave off some time while dealing in our inbox while replying or reviewing or searching through our emails, well, then we can get onto more important things and the things that we want to get done
Changing Inbox Views in Gmail
as a part of our day. So let's start off our list with number five and we're actually looking at our views.
Sometimes when we come in here into Gmail, it can be really confusing as to see where we last left off, what we haven't read, what we have read, and where we should be putting our focus.
But Gmail has recently made it a lot easier for us to view this the way that we want.
If we come up here to the gear icon and open this up, and if we scroll about halfway down, you will see a section called inbox type.
And here you can see, we can go beyond just the default view of showing things in a chronological order.
Now we can customize this default view in a few different ways, but I wanna make sure that you save time by finding the ideal way for you.
So the first option that we have here is called important first.
And if I select this, you can see that it has filtered my most important emails, the ones that it thinks I should be dealing with first up front.
Here you can see, and I can collapse that if I want to.
And then down below, I have everything else.
Now, I only have this many messages in my inbox right now.
I know some of you may have many, many more, but I'm in the habit of archiving my messages.
So now I can deal with my important messages first, and then get to everything else as I go about my day.
The other options that we have here include unread first, and this can be really helpful after you've replied to something or once you've opened up a message and you only wanna be seeing new messages first.
Now, you may not want to stay in this view at all times, but as you can see here, it really splits things up nice and easily.
I've got everything that I haven't opened that I haven't touched upfront.
And then I've got the other messages, which may still be important for me to review down below.
Another option that we have here is starred first.
So if you're used to using this star feature amongst your emails, let me go ahead and star something down below here.
You can see if I refresh my screen here, it's now going to add it to my starred viewed.
So if you are picking and choosing certain messages that you wanna see first, that star viewed may be for you.
Now, the next two are the priority inbox, which is going to put a few different things here when it comes to important, and unread, starred.
There's a few different ways that we can segment this out.
In fact, if we click on customize, you'll have a lot further options here, but I wanna get to the last one here, which is perhaps the most customizable of them all.
That's multiple inboxes.
Now, by default, you may have a few different categories such as starred or perhaps things that are drafts as you can see down here below.
But if you click on the customize option, we've got a lot more detail that we can add here.
So here are the search queries that are being used to including those messages in those different headings.
What I would recommend is that you click on learn more, which is gonna open up this little dialog box on the right-hand side of your screen.
Now, at first, it's just gonna give you a bit of a description as to how these multiple inbox sections work.
But I want you to go one step further and actually click on search criteria.
Here, you will see the full list of search operators including an example, so you can include the things that you want to see here.
Maybe you want to include things with a certain name or a certain keyword in the title.
Maybe you want to filter out things from a certain individual, such as an important client or maybe your manager or something along those lines.
You can really think about this like applying the filtering option or the advanced search option within Gmail.
But now you can put it in your customized view.
So make sure you click on learn more and then view the search operator, so you can see the full list for yourself.
All right, let's go back to our inbox.
Schedule Gmail Messages to Send Later
I'm gonna rearrange my view back to the default, and let's get to my fourth best time-saving tip.
And that has to do with scheduling a send.
So let's open up and compose an email here.
How often have you thought to yourself, oh, I need to send that email or I need to let everyone know about something, but actually I don't need to let them know right now.
What do you do?
Well, perhaps you go to your calendar and add it as a task or you set yourself a reminder as to when it's an ideal time to send that message.
Well, that's a waste of time, because now you've got to add that to a to-do list or to a calendar.
And then you've got to come back and do it.
If it's on your mind right now, and you're thinking about it, why not write the email and then you can schedule that send later?
So let me just add an address here very quickly.
I'm not gonna add any content for this example, but if we come down here to the bottom, you will notice that there is a dropdown arrow to the right of the send button.
When we click that we are going to get this schedule send option.
Now, maybe I should put in just a fake, how about a fake subject line here?
Just so we can keep track of this as a part of our example.
So I'm gonna come down here and I'm gonna select schedule send, and that's gonna open up this dialog box, and it's gonna give us a few preset times.
Now, as I've shown you in a previous video, if you want to change these preset times, you actually need to go into your Google Keep account.
You need to open up Google Keep and change your default reminders.
That's where these times are coming from.
So if you want to change these times, if you don't want them to be a 1:00 PM or 8:00 AM, as it says here when it comes to afternoon and morning, you can go into Google Keep and change your default reminder times which are associated with your Gmail account.
Now, if none of these work for you, if none of these defaults fit for this particular message, all we need to do is come down here and select pick date and time.
And I can say I want to send this out tomorrow.
I'd like to send it at about 1:30 in the afternoon.
So let's make that PM and perfect.
Tomorrow, 1:30 PM.
I'm gonna select schedule send.
Now that dialogue box is gonna close, or I should say the email message is gonna close.
We're gonna get the notification down below that it's going to send tomorrow, but what if you made a mistake?
What if you actually want to send it sooner or later?
You just want to reword it?
Well, here on the left hand side of our Gmail menu, you can see that there's an area called scheduled.
So if we click on that, it's gonna bring up all of the messages that we have scheduled for the future.
And here's that fake subject that we just created.
Now, from this view, it's only gonna show us the date.
It's not gonna actually show us the specific time.
So we will need to click on that message to get the, here, send scheduled for tomorrow at 1:30 PM, just to confirm when it is going to be scheduled in the future.
So you can come in here and review any of those messages, but if we need to change it, all we need to do here is select cancel send.
And what it's gonna do, it's gonna bring us back to that original message.
Now I can change who I'm sending it to, the subject, the text, whatever I need to do, and I can reschedule it again if I want to, or I could send it out right now if something has changed along those lines.
This can save you an awful lot of time, because when you're thinking of that message, when you're crafting that message, why wait to press the send button yourself?
You can schedule it at the ideal time that you want.
Send and Archive Button in Gmail
All right, next up on my list, number three on my time saving Gmail tips has to do with sending and archiving at the exact same time.
Now, this is particular when you are replying to a message.
One of the great ways to get a handle on your email is to archive all the messages in your inbox, in your incoming inbox once you've replied to it, because you're most likely done with it, at that point.
You've sent the message.
You've downloaded the attachment.
You've acknowledged whatever the case may be.
So why not make it easier on yourself to, when you reply to that message, automatically have that email archived, so it leaves your inbox.
It allows for some decluttering to naturally happen.
So let me go in here into… I'll just use this as a sample email, and I'm gonna come down and I'm gonna say reply.
And I'm just gonna say, hey, thanks for the info. Okay?
So once I do, so you'll see down below I actually have two send buttons.
The first one is blue, and this is our send and archive button.
If I don't want to archive it right away, maybe I want to send the message, but then I want to come up here and grab some of this information, right?
Maybe I want to copy and paste some of this information or download the attachment, whatever the case may be, I will still have my traditional send option here on the right hand side.
But by default, I've enabled my send an archive.
So now when I click this button, it has sent the message, but it has automatically archived it.
It is gone from my inbox, which is great.
It's helping me keep my inbox nice and uncluttered.
So how do you make sure that you have that option?
Let's go up to our settings again, and this time we're gonna select see all settings, and under the very first tab under general, about six or seven down, we have this option send and archive.
So here you can see, we can either show the send an archive button or we can hide the send and archive button.
Now, remember even when this is shown, you're still gonna see that traditional or natural send button.
So you don't always have to archive everything when you're replying, but this can help you save an awful lot of time as well.
All right, let's get into our top two.
And just before I do, I wanna ask you what are some of your best Gmail time saving tips or tricks.
Be sure to share them with me and with others down below in the comments.
Smart Compose Messages in Gmail
Okay, number two. When it comes to time saving, for me, has to do with smart compose.
And what do I mean by this?
I mean, allowing email to help us finish some of our sentences, so that we can just hit the tab key and move on, and hopefully craft and write and reply to our emails that much faster.
So what exactly is smart compose here in Gmail?
Well, Gmail takes a look at what you are writing in the moment, and then we'll offer suggestions to help you complete a sentence or a phrase.
Now, in order to turn this on, what we need to do is come up to settings.
And again, we're gonna select see all settings, and we're gonna scroll about halfway down, and here you can see a few different smart features.
Now, the first one here is smart compose, and we want to turn that on if you want to allow Gmail to give you those suggestions.
Now, of course you don't have to have this on.
You can turn it off.
And in fact, it's probably off by default.
The second option that you may want to pay attention to is smart compose personalization.
And what this has to do is that Gmail starts to learn the way that you write.
There's certain phrases that you use most often, the way you address people, perhaps at the beginning of an email.
And it's going to start to personalize those suggestions as well.
You don't have to have these both on, you can turn personalization off while having smart compose on, and that's still gonna allow you to use that tab feature.
It's also gonna allow you to make it a lot quicker when you're using your mobile devices.
Well, of course you don't have a tab button when you're on your mobile.
All you need to do is swipe to the right when Gmail gives you those suggestions.
Okay, now that leaves us to tip number one,
How to use Gmail Templates
which I think is the number one way to save time with your email, especially when you're replying to common questions, and that has to do with templates.
So here we are.
I'm gonna open up my compose menu here once again.
And I'm just gonna say that, I'm gonna imply that someone is asking me a question that I get all of the time.
Maybe they're inquiring about my services.
Maybe it's the first time they're reaching out.
Maybe it's just a question I get a lot about my videos here on YouTube.
Rather than spending the time to write a personalized email with a lot of information and maybe going and grabbing certain links, all I need to do is create a template.
How do you do so?
Well, if we come down here to the very bottom, you can see our more options here, and you can see that there's an option called templates.
Now here I actually have a few templates that I've already set up.
So this saves me absolutely tons of time each and every week.
Perhaps I'm gonna select this one, which I've labeled learn more about Simpletivity.
And as you can see, everything such as links, such as images, such as bolding and text formatting, it all stays the same.
So you can have a very lengthy and a very specific email for different responses or different replies saved right here within Gmail.
Now, in terms of the name of the template, it's always going to look at the subject line.
So if you are creating a template from scratch, make sure you give it a subject that is descriptive to you.
Now, you don't have to keep it.
And in the event that you are replying to someone else, it will not replace it.
So if you're replying to someone using a template, it's always going to keep the same or the existing reply address.
It will not replace it there.
But this saves me so much time because I don't need to go finding certain links.
I don't need to go and find certain pieces of information.
And remember, I can still edit this.
For example, if I want to add at the very top, I wanna add someone's name and say hi.
"Hi, Dan," for example.
If I wanna personalize the message, maybe it's not a 900-word blog post.
Maybe it's just a 700-word blog post, for example.
I can come in here and customize certain elements.
Now here's a tip for you.
When you are creating your templates within Gmail, before you go and save it, which I'm gonna show you in just a moment, make sure you remove your email signature.
So for example, if I was to save this as a brand new template right now, it is also going to save this email signature, which means when I go to use it in an actual email, I'm gonna see a double signature, right?
It's gonna show this one in addition to the one that is automatically applied to my messages.
So that's just a very helpful tip when you're creating your templates, make sure that you delete the signature before saving.
How do you save it?
Well, once you've got your template, once you've got your message written the way that you want, we come back down here to our more option.
We select templates.
And we say save draft as a template.
Now we can either override one of the ones that we have here existing, or we can say save as a new template and give it a new name.
This is so handy when you are replying to things that you get asked time and time again.
Now, if you're looking for even more ways to get the most out of Gmail and save more time, you may be interested in my filters and labels tutorial.
I'll leave a link to it right down here below.
As always, thank you for watching.
And remember, being productive does not need to be difficult.
In fact, it's very simple.
